Tag Archives: dreams

Now that she’s arrived, was there anything else to it? A life summoned itself and paused for a while. Yes, there was always a pause, Larisa noticed; a breather in between the chapters.

She never imagined her death, never was the type to bear the hubris of planning her own funeral. Like weddings, death demanded metaphors. To capture oneself, to be summarized, direly: But how can one not be so many things at once? Besides, the way she felt, ceremonies strived for a shared experience; not a centralized meditation that treated the self as the object of all other events; that separated and sought how different one was from the rest, taking for granted the universality of it all. She didn’t have the ego for it.

Larisa had been living for others, certainly: a symptom assigned mostly to her gender. In her family, she had witnessed the earlier generations of women lose themselves in sacrificial love. For the sake of their children, their husbands, their aging parents, they carried on serving; until they found themselves having a hard time remembering what they themselves had wanted, originally, all along. Remember those days? How many times she’d heard the mournful reminiscence in a woman’s voice: Those days! What happened since then, Larisa wondered, herself still a young girl; what force of obscurity slithered itself in between and demanded for a retraction, or a delay at least.

Definitely, she wouldn’t lose the sight of her own purpose, she thought! Yet, the loneliness came scratching at the backdoor, becoming louder as she compared the things other women claimed as accomplishments: dramatic courtships, the victory in which meant expensive weddings and doting husbands, as one could only hope; then, the automatic events of pregnancy and nest acquiring (building, building, gaining weightiness); the demands of a chosen lifestyle, or in the cases of the less fortunate — merely survivals. Every woman she knew had leapt into all of it without ever questioning the reality of her expectations. How could their husbands — the equally unknowing human beings with a whole other set of expectations imposed onto them — keep up? They too, when young, once dreamt of following the call of the world’s magnificence. But lives demanded to be defined by success; and what others made of success — was not at all what she’d imagined.

There was love, of course. There would always be love. Beyond her own anxiety and self-judgement, she could see that a life was only as successful as the love one projected. Still, in the beginning, it was loneliness that determined the pursuit of it; and loneliness made things more urgent, non-negotiable and somehow crucial. It conformed the shape of love, so it could fit into the missing parts; make-up for the previous mistakes of others; fix, mold, make it better. Because in a person, there were always parts missing: from too much love, or not enough of it, from the prototypes of our lovers (god bless our parents!), who couldn’t possibly step up to what love was meant to be, as she thought of it: all forgiving, non-discriminating, fluid.

And what about the needs? One had to have needs. It was a path of nature. Larisa found the balance between the self-fulfillment of those needs and the ones she could hand over to another — unpoetic and stressful. So, she chose to handle all of them on her own; not with any sense of confrontation or showmanship, but with the esteem of self-reliance. And surely, Larisa thought, it would only elevate the love. Surely, if one handled the demands of one’s survival with this much grace, there would be more room for the beauty and the compassion; the reflection of the self in the suffering of others and the almost rapturous feeling of knowing exactly how it felt to be another; for such a love lacked fear, and it could take up spaces with its tide-like tongues, and whenever it retracted, one only had to wait for its return. In light, in easiness: What surrender!

Larisa wasn’t really sure how or where, in the self, the unease began. On that day — a day unmarked by any significance — she’d gone into a church. With her head bowed and eyes half-closed, she didn’t seek answers or help, only a space from which to observe the ways her thoughts moved, sometimes birthing moods, sometimes — nothingness; and she watched herself alter, even while in stillness, mind creating matter; thoughts becoming intentions; and she cast the net into the endless vagueness and brought them back into the very is-ness of her: Into what she believed the most.

This church appeared make-shift, marking a spot where, under an influence of a former fanatical thought, an ancient Russian cathedral had been burnt down over half a century ago. A modest wooden building, unheated, undecorated, in a shape of a polygon, sat in the shadowy corner of a square. The country was living through an era of resurrected gods and revalidated heros, often dead by now, having been taken for granted for the sake of simplifying a former common ambition. Things crumbled. Alliances turned chaotic. And when everyone woke up to amended history — figures worthy of worship long gone and nearly forgotten — a common panic ensued. For even if it weren’t the ego that made a people matter, it had to be their spirit; a common memory of a civilization.

The roads had frozen overnight; and at first, she had snuck-in to thaw out her stiff toes. She purchased a candle at the door, mostly out of habit. She didn’t even know how that particular ceremony worked. Two side altars, with figures of crucified saints, sat against the walls of the church, opposite of each other. Standing there for a while, still and unnoticed, she studied the other women who moved like ghosts across the dirt floor. Everyone was fully clothed. She looked down at her feet and shifted: There was little hope of her finding much warmth there. Still, she stayed. She paused, and in the growing shadows of her memories, she waited.

Older women in head scarves, with histories written across their tired faces, were crossing themselves at their chosen mantels. Some moved their lips in prayer, repeatedly lowering their heads in a manner that came after so much practice, one was no longer moved by it. What misfortunes had brought them here? Loss required humility, otherwise one was consumed with fury. Her country had lived through tragedies with a numbness of habit. Resignation was often advised by the elderlies, yet she found herself incompetent at it.

She took another look at the suspended saints and walked over to the side alter with a Christ whose eyes were semi-open. A little girl in a rabbit fur hat clung to the leg of her grandmother. Larisa looked down at the child and without raising her hand, moved her fingers inside the mitten. The child, sensing an interaction, got shy and clutched the old woman’s leg with more zealousness, for children often appeared overwhelmed with the energy of living. Their egos struggled with the life force they had been granted (what were they supposed to do, to be? how did they matter); and juxtaposed against the even flow of hours — one’s magnificence was only seen in silence, she believed — the egos expanded; for surely, they had to become something better.

At first, it was the hair. Her thick, red hair, with angelic ringlets flocking the frame of her still cherubic face began to slip out of its follicles; and she would watch it slide along the body, in the shower — young garden snakes on sleet — flock her feet, like seaweed, before spiraling down into the drain.

“You ought to be careful, child! For hair like this, the other females will give you the bad eye!”

Her grandmother was a superstitious woman. With her thin, brittle fingers, she braided Nola’s curls into tame hair buns or the complex, basket-like constructions on top of her head, which by the end of a day, gave her headaches and made her eyes water.

The tedious ceremonies of the old world’s superstitions slowed down Nola’s childhood to half-speed. The pinning of safety pins to her underwear after bath, their heads facing downward and away from her heart — “grounding”; the triple twirling and the hanging of a rusty locket, with some dead priest’s hair, around her neck. Hemp ropes with strange beads tied around her wrists and ankles. Sometimes, when she drifted off to sleep — but not yet into her dreams — after her grandmother’s bedtime stories, she watched the shadows of the old woman move along the wall: A giant and magnificent bird casting the whispers of good winds upon her sleeping head. And in the mornings, when she wasn’t looking — grandmother would slip drops of blessed water into her glass of milk; then keep her hand behind her heart while Nola chugged it down. All that — to ward off the other women.

Where had this mistrust in the female kind come from? Nola couldn’t understand it. And as a child, she was particularly puzzled about that feared bad eye. Grandma had no tolerance for questions worked up by Nola’s imagination — a quality that later flared up in her own motherhood — so she came up with the answers on her own. (It was the worst — wasn’t it? — for a child to feel annoying, then dismissed by the habits of the bored and tired grownups. She hadn’t wanted to become like that! And yet, she was, right in the midst of it, now.) These had to be some evil women, Nola decided way back when; some ancient witches with an extra eye to give away. And they lived among the good and the kind, giving the rest of the womankind a terrible reputation.

One time, walking in her grandmother’s footsteps, through the pre-sunrise layer of the summer fog only to be seen in the Far, Far East of Russia (and in the magical place of which she’d read once, called “San Francisco”), she saw a yellow raincoat. It balanced on a pair of emaciated legs; and when they caught up with it, Nola looked back: An old woman, with wet gray hair stuck to her caved-in temples, was staring right back at her from underneath the bright yellow hood. She reminded Nola of one of those Mexican skeleton dolls of rich, exotic colors, dressed in human clothing that hung on them, like parachutes on manikins. From behind the fog that clung to every moving or inanimate object, she could hardly see the color of the woman’s eyes. They seemed to appear milky though, crowded with cataracts. But the sinister smile that stretched the old woman’s toothless mouth into a keyhole told Nola that she could see well enough to look right through into her heart.

She felt an icy shiver: A drop of accumulated rainwater slipped under her raincoat collar and began its slow avalanche down the back, along the spine, meeting up with other raindrops and her sudden sweat, growing, gaining weight; gaining momentum.

“Is this it?” Nola thought. Was this the female owner of the feared bad eye? Expecting a feeling of sickly slime, terrified yet thrilled at the same time, Nola slipped her hands into her pockets.

“Stop dragging your feet, like a tooth comb through my armpit hair!” her grandmother barked from a few steps ahead. Nola started running.

In adolescence, when all the other girls acquired breasts and waistlines, Nola cultivated auburn braids; and boys began communicating their flared-up desires by yanking them hard, that she would cry. And if ever she chased after one of such brutal Romeos, uncertain about her own manic urge, the hair whipped her back like two wet ropes.

At night, after her solitude was pretty much assured, she wrapped the clouds of her scratchy hair around her head, so she could doze off — off and away from the voices of her parents, bickering in the kitchen. (On planes, she dreamed that she could do the same to clouds. God bless her, soon enough!) When her braids began reaching the crests of her hips, Nola began the practice of making dolls out of them; and she would rest each on her pillow, next to her lips, and whisper to it her speculations about the far removed and kinder places.

“Is this how you care for your wife ‘n’ child?!” her mother would be squealing in the downstairs dirt room, if dad showed up tipsy from a few chugs of dark Russian beer.

From what Nola understood in other children’s reenactments in their shared sandboxes, her father was not a hopeless drunk at all: He never fell down in the alleys, later to be found by the female cashiers of the local delis, unlocking the back doors for early morning deliveries or briberies from those savvier Soviets who knew how to get their share of deficit produce to come that week. Never-ever, had father been taken to the Emergency Room on a sled — pulled by his same “wife ‘n’ child”, in a middle of the Russian winter — to get his stomach pumped from alcohol poisoning. No, Nola’s dad was just a jolly drunk, occasionally guilty of having a reason to celebrate something — anything! — in his Russian destiny: A National Fisherman Day. The fall of Bastille Saint Antoine. A successful summoning of mere three meals for his family, that day. Another Day in the Life of…

But mom went off, pulling at her own thinning hair, whenever the man showed up with that harmless — and actually endearing to Nola — goofy smile. Whenever Nina slipped out her bed and did an army crawl to the top of the stairs, she watched her mother’s body shiver, the skin of her arms vibrate, all — from what looked like an inside job. The woman wailed and howled, and threw herself against the hard surfaces and all the sharp corners, as if possessed by a death wish. Mom always took everything too far, into a place of difficult ultimatums and points beyond forgiveness. And watching her in such a state set off anxiety-ridden arrhythmia in Nola’s heart.

Her mother’s sad, all-knowing smile. Her choir of scoffs and sighs, and terrorizing whimpers. Her melancholic, slow head shake belonging to a cartoonish bobblehead stuck to a dashboard of a Moscow’s taxicab: getting around but not going anywhere! She felt an urge to run away from all of it — from here and from her — to somewhere, where people didn’t readily construct their painful sentences and woke up with faces drained of all curiosity or tenderness. Could that be “San Francisco”? She slept on pillows of her hair and wondered.

It’s long past midnight in Warsaw. There is a new couple that has moved into the apartment across the street.

For the last two days, it has been sitting empty, with the curtains open and the stark white mattress in the middle of the living-room. On the first of the new year (today), they have appeared: He’s tall, with pepper and salt hair; she’s lovely. And even though I cannot see the details of her face underneath her bangs, I can imagine the high cheekbones and the doll-like roundness that I’ve been seeing in the store window reflections of the last twenty years.

I watch them from my kitchen, while drinking coffee. I am jet-lagged.

The curtains remain open and the yellow light of a single lamp is getting some assistance from the screen of their TV. They’re eating dinner that consists of corn on the cob and one bucket of KFC (so very Eastern European, as I have come to learn). Occasionally, they half turn their faces to each other:

“You want some tea?”

Or,

“For what time, you think, we should set the alarm clock, in the morning?”

I leave them be and wander from one room to another to check on our drying laundry. The guidebook never promised us domestic amenities, so the discovery of a washing machine in our kitchen came as a complete surprise. The dryer button is jammed on it though, but considering I have arrived here with my arrested expectations from post-Soviet Russia, circa 1997, I am extremely grateful for the dignified living standards with which this city has accommodated us.

Besides, the absence of a dryer — I find romantic. I run my hands along the cloths from my and my lover’s body, earlier drenched from running through this cold city, and wonder what it would’ve been like if I were to enter my womanhood in my birth place. Would I have known the grace of unconditional love and the finally non-tumultuous forcefulness of me? Would I’ve grown up kind, or would the much harder life of my homeland have taken a toll on my character and aged me, prematurely? And would I have the privilege of choices that make up my identity now, still generous and grateful for the opportunities I’ve found abroad?

Identity. In my impression of the world, this word comes from the American ventricle of me. But after this week’s reunion with my father, who never had the privilege to watch me make the choices that led me to the woman that I am, I am surprised to find myself resemble him so much. Despite the separation of nearly two decades: I am my father’s daughter. Of course, by some self-written rules, it’s presupposed that I have traveled further in my life than father ever did in his. I’ve been exposed to more world, and in return, it taught me to question twice all prejudices and violations of freedom. But what a joy it’s been to find that, in my father’s eyes, life is only about truth and grace and justice; and matters of identity, for him, have no affect on any person’s freedoms.

I wander back into the kitchen, sit down into my father’s chair. Thus far, it’s been the greatest pleasure of my life to watch him eat good food that I have made. While eating, dad is curious and — here’s that word again — grateful:

“What’s that ingredient?”

And,

“What do you call this bread?”

And I can see him now: slouching just a little above his meal, in this chair; shaking his head at the meal that he finds to be gourmet, while to us — it is our daily bread. I have to look away when with childlike amusement he walks his lips along a string of melted cheese:

Here is to more such meals, my most dear love, and to the moments that define a life! that must define MY life!

The couple in the window across the street has finished their meal. The table is still cluttered with settings, crumbled paper napkins and a red bucket whose iconography — although recognizable — is somehow different from the red-and-white signs that pollute the American skyline. The couple is now on the couch: She’s sitting up and removing pillows from behind her back, then tossing them onto the wooden floor. He is fetching two smaller ones, in white pillow cases, from the bed. Together, they recline again and progressively tangle up into each other, like lovers who have passed the times of dire passion and landed in that even-tempered place of loving partnership.

The light of the TV is now the only one illuminating their spartan room. From where I stand, now drinking a cup of black tea (still, jet lagged), I only see the back of his head and her hand that has ended up near his right shoulder. Occasionally, he half turns his face toward her, then turns toward the flickering blue light again:

“Are you comfortable, my love?”

Or,

“Would you rather watch the news?”

I walk into my bedroom to fetch my computer. The yellow light follows me from the kitchen and slowly dissipates as I approach the next doorway. It, ever so lightly, hits the exposed leg of my sleeping lover. I think I study him, but instead the mind gives room to memories of similar moments and visions. And in that suspended history of us, I reach into the drawer.

The roles reversed: When I departed, nearly twenty years ago — so reckless in my youth and dumb — he was the last to disconnect our gazes.

Such had to be the burden of the ones we left behind! And such — the mindless blessing of the ones with great adventures to distract them from the pain of leaving.

What courage it had cost him — to hold the ground and not crumble then, until I turned the corner! And how I would never learn it, until I birthed a child, myself!

And yet, he did: My darling old man. The hero of my lifetime doomed to never disappoint my expectations.

The one to whom my every love would be compared: the ultimate ideal for a man’s goodness. My goodness.

The one who, in tumultuous times, had to commit the ultimate, unselfish act of love — and let me leave in my pursuit of bigger dreams than our homeland could offer. (Would those dreams turn out to be worth our mutual sacrifice? My life is yet to reveal its bottom line. But how I pray!)

And when my hardships happened, oceans away — the one to suffer heartbreaks of a parent’s helplessness and the titan strength of prayer.

The one to not let go, despite the distances and family feuds. (Alas, human stupidity: It never fails to permeate a story.) The one to change in order to keep up. The one — to love and wait.

And pray.

This time, I saw him first!

The crowds of tired passengers were whirling all around him: Loves leaving, in their acts of youthful recklessness or being pulled by bigger circumstances. The lucky ones — were coming home. The floor tiles of the airport endured the writing of rushed footsteps, scoffed wheels of those things that people felt they had to bring along; the punctuation of chic heels of pretty girls; the patter of children’s feet, so blissful and undamaged in their innocence. Tomes could be written if every footstep could be interviewed: The snippets of humanity’s stories that were so often unpredictable, impossible to imagine. But when these stories happened to make sense — when stubborn courage persevered, when love learned to forgive — they found unequal beauty. (Oh, how we could all pray for that! Oh, how we should pray!)

One million more of pedestrians could be packed into the terminal — and I would still recognize my father’s outline. The mind’s a funny thing, of course: Recently, it began to blackmail me with forgetfulness. The first nightmare in which my father had no face — would be the turning point I’d call Forgiveness.

But when I saw him — and I saw him first! — I knew that I would not be able to forget him, ever! Because he was the one I’d spent half a lifetime trying to get back to; the one with whose name I’d christened my every accomplishment; with which I had defeated every failure. He was the love; the never failing reason for it. My starting point and the North Star whose shine I followed to find my way, in and out of grace, and back again.

And when I saw him first and called him: “Oh, my goodness!”

It had to be a prayer, for I had learned to pray — in order to come back.

No cinematic trick can capture the surreal speed with which he turned in my direction. The mind sped up. It knew: This had to be THE memory of my lifetime. This — was where my life would turn its course; and in the morning, I would no longer be the prodigal daughter looking for her homecoming, but an inspired child of one great man.

He turned. The smile with which he studied my departure, nearly twenty years ago, returned to his face, this time, again: It was a tight-lipped gesture of a man trying his hardest not to crumble. The loss had been magnificent; an the return — worth every prayer.

I waved. And then, I waved again. The mind continued turning quickly. It had to remember every single detail of that day, so it could last forever. And fleetingly, it granted me a thought: The manner of my wave was very childlike, as if belonging to an infant mirroring a kind stranger’s hand. But in the moment, I knew no vanity. I cared none — for grace.

When dad’s hand flew up, I noticed: He’d aged. His timid gesture was affected by the trembling fingers and the disbelief of someone who hadn’t realized the perseverance of his prayer. C’mon! There had to be some moments in his life, historical events of giant hopelessness that the entire world endured since last I left, when he, like me, would lose the sight of reason.

Or maybe not. Perhaps, my father prayed! Perhaps, he prayed and bargained with his gods for this very opportunity to persevere life — and see my running back into his arms.

For this one moment, all — had been worth it! My life was worth when my father held me for the first time since nearly twenty years ago.

I don’t run into him much, maybe once a month. At first, I notice the white clunker, with the profile of a blue eagle plastered onto its side panel. Considering that most of the time, it’s a complete clusterfuck on my street, I usually see his car parked in the handicap spot, at the end of the block.

“How ever does he manage to not get cold? or hot?” I study the missing doors and the rusty metal of the vehicle. Zero isolation in that car.

Shit! I can’t even call it that: “a car”. It’s more like a golf cart, really; and I’ve often wondered whose genius idea it was to have the most important and the most underpaid government workers riding around in those things.

And those uniforms! Can’t some company get a better handle on the tailoring of that seemingly itchy baby- and navy-blue getup? Sometimes, I’ll watch some other skinny postman drudging a metal basket filled with mail through a block (but not my block!), and I feel sorry for the guy.

But not this one! My guy — is proud. Methodically, he returns to his little postal truck and grabs only as much mail as he can carry. He approaches each house with the respectful knowledge of its property; the habits, the characters of its residents. He must know all the local dogs and learn the manners of the cats basking on our lawns, porches or window sills. And even with the wild tenants, he must be well-acquainted: the curious raccoons, the badass skunks; the hooligan porcupines and the bullies that are the local coyotes. (But only when they’re in packs, of course. Alone, they are pathetic.) Yet, I imagine he navigates their territories with an even pace and a calm demeanor. They live here and have done so with more sensible behavior than the humankind. And even though he is not at their service, he knows to respect their rules.

Because he is my personal Clint Eastwood, and that man — never loses his good graces.

There is an abandoned house in the middle of my block. Or, so I thought. I thought that surely something sad must’ve happened to this house, leaving it to be occupied by the local homeless cats and runaway teens. But then again, the front yard of it is so overwhelmed by weeds, that only a wild thing cat navigate through it. And yet, I see him, sometimes — my quiet hero of methodical existence, my occasional man of the hour — and he come around to the side fence and hurls a tied bundle of mail to the doormat. I guess the house is not abandoned after all, but it still must have some sad stories to tell.

To my building, the man usually arrives toward the later part of the afternoon. The Hollywood Postal Station is in the same zip code as this block, but by the time he leaves, all the surrounding streets turn into a disaster of screeching, honking, smoking metal. Yet, he endures — my bearer of good news and deliverer of late notices, my confronter of procrastinators and the messenger of long lost loves. And then, he returns the next day with another handful of mail. Another truck-full of messages.

And if on occasion, I find him in the downstairs lobby, I watch him sorting out the papers with what seems to be a knowing smirk. Can he decipher the message of each envelope just by the look of it? Does he know which handwriting belongs to a lover, and which — to a child? Can he feel, by touch, the perforated patches caused by the tears of a heartbroken girl, pleading for her love to return? Does he wonder about the timezones, the climates, the political regimes which each message must endure — in order to make it to the bottom of a mailbox?

“Good day,” he’ll say. Not really a question, or a statement that taunts me for my own option. Just: Good day.

I don’t even know his name. I call him “love”. Sometimes, I ask him about the traffic, and in the winter, I bring down as many tangerines as I can fit into my palm. I wait and study him, as he continues to shuffle the papers into the identical gaps. No matter my impatience or the importance of an anticipated message, I NEVER interrupt.

Today, he said, “Hold up!”; then, grabbed the only bill inside my mailbox and handed it to me.

She was encouraged to grow up as tall as her father and to smell like her beautiful mama, even if she was ever caught in the midst of a drought.

“Because that’s what we, pine trees, do, my little one,” her mama told her. “And if you grow up particularly pretty, they might choose you, in the middle of next winter.”

“Who are ‘they’?” the baby tree would ask, every year. (Like all children, she liked her favorite stories repeated to her, endlessly.)

“The unrooted ones,” mama would whisper and sway to block the tiny dust clouds heading into her child’s hair — with her long, long limbs.

Oh, no! She wouldn’t grow up to be an ordinary tree, her mama gossiped to other mothers. Her daughter was meant to be unique. First of, she was gaining inches day by day.

“The taller you grow, the sooner the unrooted ones will get you!”

And: She was pretty! Such a pretty baby tree: with long, dark green needles that weighed down her lean branches toward the ground! All the other kids seemed to have upright branches. Their needles lined up into mohawks and made them more susceptible to storms. When winds gained speed, or rain began to pound the soil above her roots, she seemed to endure it all with grace. Light on her feet, she would let whatever weather run its moods through her hair; and after every type of precipitation, she made tiny slides for the rascal raindrops. The little ones would chirp and tumble into one another; hang onto the very edge of her needles, then leap onto the next one — and repeat.

She didn’t know where the rascal raindrops would go once they rolled off her long hair and hit the ground; but she imagined they built tunnels in the soil and lived there, with their families (but after they would fall in love, of course).

One time, though, she questioned her own theory when a particularly familiar rascal raindrop appeared her eyelash, after she awoke from her impatient dreams:

“Haven’t I seen you here before?” she asked the sparkling babe. But he was already chirping too loudly to hear her question; and as soon as the other kids woke up, he began to slide, slowly at first and on his belly, with his arms outstretched forward. The further he slid, the more rascals joined him, and they would go faster, laugh — louder; and their chirping made her tilt her branches even lower and give the kids a bigger thrill.

“Maybe,” she thought, “they all fly up to the sun instead — to tell its rays to be a bit gentler on us.”

(Drought — was told to be her only fear. Besides that — she had none.)

Sometimes, she would get the glimpse of the unrooted ones. A particular one continued coming around too early in the mornings; so, most of the time, she would sleep right through his visits. One day, though, he came up to her and woke her up with his shadow.

He was taller than her, but not as tall as mama. He had flat hair, the color of a sickly pine. It was flat and so dense, it clung to his trunk in one single layer.

“What a strange creature!” the baby tree thought.

“Don’t! Slouch!” she heard her mama whisper through her teeth. She snuck a peak: Mama looked sleepy and wet. But she would NOT shake off her raindrops yet: Because she wanted for all of the unrooted one’s attention to go — to her child.

Would that be it? Is that how it would happen: The moment when she would be taken away to the magical place from where other pine trees never-ever returned? It had to be wonderful there, she thought. Oh, how she craved to travel!

She let the unrooted one pet her hair. He made an unfamiliar noise and bent down to her. A little current of air brushed against her branch. The unrooted one repeated the noise and petted her, again.

She then noticed he had a patch of different-colored needles on his tree top. They were the color of gray snow (like sleeping raindrops). Then, he went back to giving her a treat that smelled absolutely atrocious but mama said it had to be good for her. So, she closed her eyes and sucked it all up, to the last stinky bit. She would behave and do whatever the main unrooted one would want her to do. Whatever it would take — to get her to that place.

There were some stories she’d overheard from the elders. Some said that unrooted ones took them to more delicious soils. Others mentioned that they would only feed them water, in that place — and that was truly strange. But the common truth was that the chosen ones got to wear pretty things and learn how to sparkle.

True: Sometimes, it flies out of her, like a butterfly trapped in between the two tiny palms of a kiddo who hasn’t lived for long enough to realize the fragility of her dreams, yet.

“You can’t do that to butterflies, little one! They break their wings.”

But other times, she must cradle the cocoons of her beginnings, checking up on them, every few breaths: Are they ready for the magical reveal of their births yet? Can they leap out at the world that didn’t even suspect how much it needed them? On harder days of creation, the luxury of time begins to test her patience, and it challenges her — to start. To just: Start.

Because starting — takes a courageous flight of fancy. And only she knows — because she has asked for her creator to allow and to forgive her the hubris to make things happen — only she knows when her beginnings can no longer wait to happen.

The days, the moments, the creations that begin easily — are often easier to also take for granted. And they can’t really be trusted, actually. But the easy creations lighten the step and color the world with more flattering palettes of her imagination. And even though, she may not remember the achievement of that day, she gets the privilege of spending it — while half dreaming: Still the little girl, chasing butterflies, and trapping them in between her tiny palms.

Gratitude comes easy on those days of nearly no struggle. And she breathes through the misty sensation in her eyes: After all, her compassion has not expired yet! And despite all the losses, it continues to give back.

On luckier days, life permits for such illusions to last: That people are good. That art — matters. That beauty — is a common addiction of all humankind. And that perhaps (please, please, let her have this “perhaps”!) we all speak a common language which may be determined by our self-serving needs — but that those needs belong to LOVE. Alas! How marvelous — are those days!

And she learns to savor them! The days of easier creation — of more graceful survival, when the whole world somehow happens to accommodate for her dreams — those days she must savor for the future. Because in that future, as she has grown to accept (once she’s grown up and out of certain dreams), there will be days of hardship. She knows that. No, not just the hardships of life itself: Those, she has by now learned to forgive. After all, they have taught her her own humanity. They have connected all the capillaries between the organs of her empathy and inspirations. And she understands it all so much better — after the days of hard life.

But the hardships of persevering through life for long enough to get to the next easier moment — that task can only be done by eluding herself. So, she suspends the memories of better days. Easier days of creation. She stretches them out, makes them last. (They taste like soft caramel or bits of saltwater taffy.) She rides them out to exhaustion and prays — oh, how she prays! — that they will bring her to the next beginning.

Then, there are days, seemingly mellow, but that do not grant her easy beginnings. On those days, she must work. She must earn the first sentences to her dreams and earn her beginnings. She may go looking for inspiration, in other people’s art. And sometimes, that works just fine: Like a match to a dry wick, other art sets her imagination on fire. All it takes is a glimpse of a tail of that one fleeting dream. It takes a mere crumb of someone else’s creation to set off the memory and the inspiration — follows. Just a whisper of that common language! A whiff of the unproved metaphysical science that it’s all one. We — are one. (Is that silly?)

And when the art of others does not start another flame, then she must have the courage to begin. Just simply — begin! It’s mechanical, then: a memorized choreography of fingers upon the keyboard, the sense memory of the tired fingers clutching a pen. On those days, she merely shows up — and she must accept that it would be enough, on just those days.

Because if she doesn’t show up, then she may as well consider herself defeated: Yes, by the struggles of life and the skepticism of those who do NOT have the courage to dream. To start. To begin.

The courage to remain the children they once were, also chasing butterflies and ice-cream men; sucking on icicles in the winter and building castles under the watch of the giant eye of the sun.

The day when she stops beginning — she will consider herself a failure. But until then, she must continue to begin.

She’s wearing a pair of purple tights and a shirt with stripes of lemon and lime. Her tiny ankle socks match the overall yellowish-green of the shirt, and her feet are trying to wrap around the baby-size chair that used to belong to her younger self (not much younger though, considering she is not even in her teens yet.)

I notice the purple outline around the collar of the shirt:

“Those are some courageous color combos, my tiny one!” I nearly say out loud, but then I stop myself: Getting off on embarrassing a child would make me a major shithead!

And it’s not even mytype of purple either — but it is hers — as we’d figured out over the years. But, actually, her favorite color is green, so she often secretly dedicates her purple choices — to me. Her green is democratic: She likes most shades of it. Although, come to think of it, I’ve never really asked. When ever had I become one of those silly grown-ups — to dare taking these details for granted!

Her most heartbreaking features are her mother’s freckles and her father’s strawberry chin. From the way the sunlight hits her face, I notice the freckles — they now take up her whole cheeks, from the bridge of the nose and up to the temples; and I suppress a desire to hug her: She’s all grown up now — and way too mature for my mushy nonsense. So, I sort of let her dictate the boundaries, on her terms; and keep my grown-up business to myself.

For the last hour, she’s been playing with her father’s iPhone, pulling up songs we both might like. Some tunes are original. Others — are a remake by Glee: all the rave among the kids these days. (And if it weren’t for her, I would have never known it: I AM a grown-up, after all!)

Here comes the widely popular tune of this year: “There’s a fire starting in my heart…”

“Do you like Adele?” she has once asked me before, while hanging out in my bedroom. It made for a long discussion, that night, and we each took turns browsing YouTube for our favorite tunes and dancing. Yes, actually dancing: She, non-vainly, and I — unleashed by her innocence.

“Do you like Adele?” she echos now, looking up at me past her long bangs.

I like the way she wears her hair: It’s always shiny and sleek, never the tumbleweed seen in the photographs of me when I was her age.

We have both grown up as tomboys: I, perpetually clad in sweats as soon as I could get out of my itchy uniform, was always trying to outrun the boys and to lead the armies of first-graders in search of treasures on our town’s rooftops. She — kicks ass at soccer, climbs trees, plays handball; rides bicycles and rollerblades, masterfully and much better than me; and she always looks out for those who are tinier and more helpless. She is kind. She is always kind. For me, kindness, by now, takes discipline. To her — it’s still second nature. Or the first.

We’ve grown up under much different restrictions: I was bound to endless rules by my motha, the pedagogue, and the regulations of bureaucrats that dictated our lives. She, however, is ruled by common sense. Like her American-born parents, she is in tune with the concept of freedom and is already more aware of her rights and liberties at the age of ten. Unlike me, she also knows that choices come with a consequence.

Like this one — of her procrastinating on her homework for the sake keeping me company.

“Love that song!” I mumble. But she is already sneaking a peak over her shoulder and suppressing a gleeful smile. She knows.

Alright! Enough of the nonsense: It’s time for the homework! Or, so the adults tell her.

“Last one! Last one, I promise!” she says, but doesn’t plead. She is SO much cooler than me! Cooler than I’ve ever been!

It’s Glee, again: “I’m walking on sunshine, wooah!”

In a matter of seconds, she bounces, puts the iPhone away, whips out her backpack and plops down in a chair across the table from me. When she thinks, she looks away (sometimes chewing on a pencil): My own childhood habit. Which dreams is she sizing up, right now? What brave escapes is she plotting?

Bright and self-sufficient, she completes the work effortlessly, in a matter of minutes. No problem. She never gives the grown-ups a problem. Neither did I. It’s easier that way: keeps you clear of their nonsense.

But she does say though:

“I wish eight went into 60 evenly.”

I suppress a chuckle — and another hug. I still wish for such things all the time, my tiny one! And that — still! — must be just a matter of my innocence; or what’s left of it.

As far as I felt, I was still a fucking nobody: commuting to my graduate classes six out of seven days a week, on a 45-minute subway ride from the Bronx.

Sure, as any not-too-lame looking chick, I tried to upgrade my style with an occasional ten-dollar purchase from the H&M on Broadway and 34th. And I had even managed to go out with a few finance guys from Wall Street and realized they were no more sophisticated than my 20-year-old ass. But despite my now impressive expertise of the Island’s neighborhoods and demographics, my favorite shops to browse and windows to shop (only the ones where I was least harassed by salesgirls) — I was hardly a New Yorker yet.

Shit! I didn’t even know any good places to eat! Despite the 50/50 scholarship, the pleasure of having a graduate degree — forty five grand later — was leaving my ass seriously broke. For one, I could never join my classmates to their lunch outings. And because of my immigrant pride, when shooting down their invites, I would give them reasons related to my studious nature (and not because I was eating beans out of a can, in an unheated basement apartment, every night). So, for the entire twelve hour day spent on the Island, in between classes, I would have to last on a pitiful, homemade sandwich made out of a single slice of pumpernickel bread and a veggie burger, glued together with a thin spread of margarine and then cut in half. The meal was so embarrassing, I would do my best to chomp it down alone, in the staircase of a school wing unlikely to be visited by my classmates; or, if I was getting the shakes — inside a bathroom stall.

And this was with my two shitty, part-time jobs accounted for!

And because my education was costing me an arm and a leg — and possibly my sanity and longevity, in the end — boy! did I look forward to the end of every semester. Most of my colleagues would leave for their wholesome looking families — in Connecticut or wherever else purebred Americans had their happy childhoods — and there, I imagined, they sat around on their white-fenced porches and threw tennis balls for their pedigree golden retrievers to fetch. For Christmas, they retold their tales of crazy, filthy, overcrowded Manhattan while clutching giant cups of hot cocoa and apple sider in front of electric fireplaces, and waiting for the contributions of cash. In the summer, they’d allow their parents to pay their airfare for the pleasure of their company in the Caribbean or the Riviera.

I, on the other hand, would remain stuck in the Bronx.

(Well. It was either that, or going to visit my obese stepfather and endure his interrogations about what I was planning to do with my art school education, for which he was NOT paying.)

So, for the last two years of grad school, I stuck around on the Island. And whatever happy lives my classmates were deservingly pursuing elsewhere, I still thought I had it the best: I was free and young, in New York Fuckin’ City! Unthought of, for my long removed Russian family!

In those days, it was between me and the Island. Just the two of us. Finally, I would have the time and discipline to follow the schedule of free admission nights to all Manhattan museums. With no shame, I would join the other tourists waiting for discounted Broadway tickets at the Ticketmaster booth in Times Square. In the summer, I would gladly camp out in Central Park over night, so that I could get a glimpse of some Hollywood star giving Shakespeare a shot at the Delacorte. I read — any bloody book I wanted! — at the Central Branch, then blacken my fingers with the latest issue of Village Voice, while nearly straddling one of the lions up front. And in between my still happening shitty jobs, I would work on my tan on the Sheep Meadow; then peel on my uniform (still reeking of the previous night’s baskets of fries) and return for my graveyard shift in the Bronx.

Yes, it was MY time: to be young and oblivious to the hedonistic comforts of life. I was in the midst of a giant adventure — that forty five grand could buy me — and outside of my curiosity, all the other pleasures of life could wait.

“Now, what are you planning to do with your art school education, hon?” one of my former undergrad professors asked me during an impromptu date.

Snide! Ever so snide, he had a talent for making you feel not up to par — ever! If he were to try that on me today, I would flaunt my post-therapy terminology on boundaries and self-esteem. But back then, I was eating lunches inside the bathroom stalls of my Theatre Arts Building and wearing a button name tag for work, at nighttime. So, I would endure the condescending interrogations over a cup of some bullshit organic soup he’d insist I ordered — and for which I would pray he would offer to pay later, as well.

“Well. I guess you could always teach,” he’d say while packing up to leave for his rent-controlled apartment on the Upper East Side. (Whom did he have to fuck in order to live there for the last two decades?)

He had a point though: New York didn’t need another girl with her romantic dreams of love and starlet success. New York — could do just fine without me.

But still: It was MY time! MY youth in the city! His — was long gone, and I supposed it was reason enough to despise me.

But how ever unrealistic were my pursuits — and how ever hard was the survival — I still had plenty of curiosity in me to give it all a fair try.

“Make a wish,” he said. “If you wish for something good — it WILL come true.”

I held the ring he gave me in the middle of my palm, and I stared at the open space caught in the center of its beaded circle. It was made out of a tightly wound spiral of a single metallic line, as thin as a single hair on a horse’s mane. I thought of my grandmother’s cuckoo clock whose pendulum she had stopped winding-up, suddenly one night.

Her husband, a retired fisherman, had gained himself a habit in his old age: He’d climb up to the roof above their attic to watch the sunset every night. There, he would witness the reunion of two unlikely lovers: The sun would give up the ambition of its skies and melt into the waters of the Ocean beneath; and every such reunion would illuminate the old man’s eyes with colors of every precious stone in the world.

There, up on the rooftop, my grandmother would find him, when she returned home from work.

“My little darling boy!” she’d gosh. “You’re too old for this game.”

She was eleven years his junior; but after a lifetime of waiting for the Ocean to return her lover, she hadn’t managed to forget her worries. And even with his now aged body radiating heat in their mutual bed each night, she would dream up the nightmares of his untimely deaths.

“I’ve died so many times in your sleep, my baby lark,” he joked in the mornings, “I should be invincible by now.”

Still, the woman’s worrisome wrath turned her into a wild creature he preferred to never witness: They were unlikely lovers, after all. So, he’d smirk upon her scolding, obey and lithely descend. Then, he would chase my grandmother into the corner bedroom of their modest hut. And she would laugh. Oh, how she would laugh!

One day, after she scolded him again, he slipped; and as she watched each grasp betray him, she suddenly expected that her lover could unfold his hidden wings and slowly swing downward, in a pattern of her cuckoo clock’s pendulum, or a child’s swing. But he was an injured bird: That’s why he could no longer go out to sea.

Upon the permanently wet ground, he crashed. And on that night, she stopped winding-up the spiral inner workings of her clock.

“Well? Did you make a wish?” the old Indian merchant asked me after I slipped his gift onto the ring finger of my left hand.

The beads rolled on the axis of the spiral and slid onto my finger like a perfect fit. On its front, four silver colored beads made up a pattern of a four-petalled flower, or possibly a cross. I bent the fingers of my hand to feel its form against my skin. Under the light, the beads immediately shimmered.

“Well? Did you?” the old, tiny man persisted.

Instead of answering him, I pressed the now ringed hand against my heart and nodded.

“See. It is already coming true,” he said.

He was by now sitting in a lotus position on top of a lavender cloud. It had earlier slipped out from behind the room with bamboo curtains, in the doorway, and it snuggled against his leg like a canine creature. Before I knew it, the old man got a hold of the scruff of the cloud’s neck, and he reached down below — to help me up.

His hand was missing a ring finger. How had I not noticed that before? I studied his face for remnants of that story. But it was not its time yet, so I got lost in between the wrinkles of his brown skin and followed them up to his eyes:

His eyes were two small suns, with amber colored rays. The center of each iris was just a tiny purple dot, too narrow to fit in my reflection. I looked for it though until the suns began to spin — each ray being a spoke on a wheel — faster and faster.

The spirals of the old man’s watch began unwinding, and we floated up through the layered clouds of time, up to the sunroof. With a single gesture of his arm, the man unlatched the windowed frames. He sat back down, shifted until his sit bones found their former markings in the lavender cloud; and when he turned to face me, I realized he had become a young lover of my own: with jet black hair and a pair of smirking lips of that old fisherman who had stopped the spiral of the clock inside my grandma’s hut.

“I had a feeling about you,” he said and buried his four-fingered hand inside my loosened hair. “You are the type to always wish — for good.”